Travels in a Thin Country (28 page)

‘Yes! Most certainly yes. Even my children feel German, though they don’t speak the language. My youngest son feels more German than Chilean.’

A pregnant granddaughter appeared with a plate of
sopaipillas
(squarish doughnuts) and a dish of cherry jam. Unfortunately, said Gerd, she was not a ‘Bible student’, as he referred to the Witnesses. None of the family were, though he
had stuck to the faith for 37 years, and he said, in English, ‘I am alone in the trenches’.

After the invitation to Antarctica was delivered the logistics of the trip had involved, over a six-week period, a succession of inconclusive telephone calls from sweaty phone boxes and hand-written faxes to generals, as well as the expenditure of a good deal of nervous energy. Everyone in Santiago had told me I’d never get there, and their words mocked me as I haemorrhaged money, time and mental health on the project. I had come to feel that the whole trip would be left dangling if I didn’t get to the southernmost point of what Chileans think of as their country.

The problem was not a lack of goodwill, or of authority: I was an official guest of the air force, and nobody disputed it. The problem was communicating with the right people at the right time to make the necessary arrangements. Often I had walked three miles to a telephone at the appointed hour of eight in the morning to find it broken or that the person I needed had been called away.

As soon as I arrived in Punta Arenas I had begun groping around, if one can grope on the telephone, for a departure time: air force scheduling was erratic under any circumstances, and when it had Antarctic conditions to take into account it was almost a minute-to-minute business. The uncertainty made me agitated. In addition, there had been no mention of equipment. A set of thermals had been languishing at the bottom of the carpetbag since the journey began (and had been carted doggedly through the Atacama desert) and I had a professional jacket and boots: that was it. I asked, over the phone, what I should bring.

‘Oh, just pack your woollies – and don’t forget your camera!’ said an amiable sergeant as if I were going to Skegness for a winter break.

I was finally instructed to present myself at Air Base Chabunco at eleven o’clock one Tuesday morning. Only then, with a celebratory flourish, did I allow myself to rip the cellophane packaging off the thermals.

I turned up at the windy airfield overlooking the Magellan Strait at nine-thirty, almost paralysed by anxiety. At least the airman at the high-security gate had my name – or something approximating to it when pronounced in Spanish – on a short list. I was told to wait at the civilian airport a mile away, and a lieutenant drove me there in a jeep.

Other members of the party trickled in. The first were two builders employed in the construction of the first Antarctic church. What mattered most down there to the Chileans was assertion of their national identity, because that, as they perceived it, validated their claim to the land. The Catholic Church was an integral part of that identity, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of them had rejected it.

A dapper army officer on a business trip followed the churchbuilders into the terminal. He was being sent to investigate a military plane which had crashed on the runway at the main Chilean Antarctic base two days previously, and later he told me enthusiastically about this crash and the perilous conditions in the Antarctic. The next person to come in was a petrochemical engineer from ENAP, the national petroleum company, who was supervising the construction of a diesel pipeline from a maritime terminal to the base, and he was accompanied by his beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter. Arrival six was a young woman from Valdivia who knew someone in the air force.

We sat around. The army officer flossed his teeth. A captain appeared and said there was a problem with an engine. There were only two civilian flights that day, both to Santiago, and I watched the airport fill and empty, fill and empty, like a cowshed at milking time. A kiosk opened during these brief
periods of activity offering a listless selection of confectionery and a limited range of reading material. Popular magazines in Chile of the
Hello
! variety were much like their counterparts everywhere else in the world except for their titles: one magazine which I often observed people reading was named
Things
and another
Very Interesting
.

Seven hours passed. Assuming that Hercules planes are not equipped with a Ladies I had put all the thermals on in advance. These included ankle-length longjohns and a longsleeved vest. By lunchtime I was in danger of passing out from heat exhaustion. In the middle of the afternoon I was standing outside, taking some air, and through the glass doors I saw an official appear in front of my hopeful fellow-travellers. They leapt up. I rushed in. The man had asked them to move so that the cleaners could sweep that area of the airport. It was the most exciting thing that had happened all day. The fraying cord of hope unravelled a little further at six when the captain came back and said there was another problem, this time unspecified, and told us to go home and come back at six-thirty in the morning. The sergeant in charge of the church-builders was driving them to their boarding-house in town, and I decided to instal myself in a room in their lodgings, working on the assumption that the plane wasn’t going to leave without them.

The churchbuilders weren’t particularly interested in Antarctica. What they were interested in was when they might finish their work there, the football champions Colo Colo and the marital status of the young woman from Valdivia. To pass the evening they hired a video called
Retorno al Futuro II
which the obliging family who owned the boarding-house watched with us in their living room; a ten-year-old son insisted on the presence of the family chicken in the room.

Something went wrong with the television screen, causing the subtitles to disappear, so the churchbuilders prevailed
upon me to provide a simultaneous translation of their video.

The next morning we went straight to the door of a Hercules built in the United States in 1980. A perishing wind cut across the airstrip, stinging our faces, and a jeep arrived loaded with cargo for Antarctica, including a vacuum cleaner and crates of Coca-Cola. The young woman from Valdivia turned up, controversially, with the dapper crash-inspector. We boarded, and strapped ourselves into red webbing fold-down seats.

Even when the plane took off I was convinced it was going to develop engine trouble, and turn back, and that all flights would be suspended indefinitely and I would never see the seventh continent and never finish my Chilean journey. The cabin did actually fill with acrid smoke, but nobody looked very worried about it so I supposed it was normal. We advanced over the gunmetal Strait, the sky, more enormous now, streaked with salmon pink and petrol blue clouds. The Strait was so narrow that I began to appreciate Magellan’s achievement in finding it. Tierra del Fuego followed shortly, then water – the Pacific, and the Atlantic.

A contingent of air force personnel had come with us. The plane was very noisy, and every single person except me had brought protective ear-phones. The bastards could have told me, I thought. I asked to go into the cockpit. It was large, up a ladder, and there were seven people in it. After chatting to a couple of them for a few minutes I noticed an elderly man wearing dark glasses hunched in a seat sunk into the wall. His hands were jammed into the pockets of an expensive – looking black wool overcoat with gold decorations on the shoulders. He was sitting absolutely still, his skin pale against the black fabric, and he looked deadly, his jowelly face expressionless.
My God
, I thought,
it’s him
. But it wasn’t Pinochet. It was a naval captain rejoining his ship, anchored in Antarctica.

There was a man in the cockpit who had been living at
Teniente Rodolfo Marsh, the largest Chilean base in Antarctica, for two years. He was very enthusiastic about it. ‘It’s a paradise,’ he said. ‘No crime, and no danger. My children are innocents.’ He had three young children, and he took them to the continent once a year to expose them to microbes. The entire family caught a cold as soon as they landed in Punta Arenas. They had everything at Marsh, including a school. There were a couple of hundred residents in the summer and about ninety in the winter. Antarctic service is voluntary, and there is no shortage of takers.

Back in the body of the plane the lower orders of the air force larked around with redundant red webbing and blocks of polystyrene. When one of the blocks flew across the cabin and hit me on the shoulder a representative followed in pursuit, and he sat down next to me and introduced himself, speaking loudly right into my ear. He was from the desert north, and he said, ‘I’ll never get used to the cold, not if I live here till I’m a hundred and one’. It didn’t take us long to get onto the subject of the Falklands War and Chilean assistance to the British RAF. ‘We painted the crown off a plane at our base, and we gave your men our flying jackets. It was very funny seeing them with our name tags. You know, “Gonzalo” is thought of as a small, swarthy bloke. When I saw a tall, blond Englishman in a jacket labelled “Gonzalo” I really laughed a lot.’ The troops often spoke like this. The officers did not. I wheedled a fighter pilot round to the subject once, and he said, ‘I saw many things. I do not speak them.’

As we came down the sea reappeared, its surface pierced with icebergs. Everything was shining. It was like entering another universe; a surreal one, beyond us. Some of the icebergs were ice-blue. So that was where the locution ‘ice-blue’ came from.

We crossed Drake Passage and approached the South Shetlands, the Antarctic archipelago named by Scottish sealers
at the end of a tapering tail of land flicked out from the amorphous white continent. The petrochemical engineer looked up from his
Reader’s Digest
and pointed out King George Island. As we got nearer I could see that it wasn’t all white; part of it was dark earth. It was summer in Antarctica. But most of it was white. There was so much white land, fluted like corduroy and plated with glaciated slopes, glittering and reflecting the sun. There were some ice cliffs, but mostly the land sloped down to the ocean, which crusted into ice in a wide band all around the island. A collection of brown pinpricks appeared, and it made me laugh out loud to see the Lilliputian base set down there on the snow.

We landed in a roar. When the door was opened a glacial blast swept into the Hercules, and as I set foot on Antarctica, my heart singing, a man dressed like a yeti approached me.

‘Mrs Sara Wheeler? Welcome to Antarctica. I am Commandante Leopaldo, and you are my responsibility on this icy continent.’

He looked as though this were an onerous task, so I tried to be friendly, to break the ice, as it were.

The base consisted of clusters of portacabin-type buildings, all raised several feet off the ground, with flat roofs and small, square windows. We entered the mess, one of the largest; the lobby was busy, as it took people ten minutes to divest themselves of their outer layers of clothing. The floor was splotched with puddles. The mess was as well-heated as my flat at home in the winter, and air force personnel sat around in T-shirts in a lounge area, chatting or reading mail. Leopaldo fetched me a coffee. After a quarter of an hour of small talk we got dressed up again, went outside and walked down to Fildes Bay. The circumpolar sea consisted, to some three hundred yards out, of millions of chunks of neon blue ice, and a sinister grey Armada vessel was anchored beyond them.

There was a bank a few hundred yards from the shore – a
bank that dispenses money, like the ones you find in every high street. The manager, open-collared, leapt to his feet when Leopaldo ushered me in, and he kissed me before typing my name on a certificate indicating that I had been given one thousand dollars by an Antarctic bank (I had not). In the meteorological station nearby I was shown the studio of Radio Sovereign FM. On Friday evenings it broadcast a quiz show. All the questions were about Antarctica, and other bases took part, although they first had to find someone who could speak Spanish. The Chinese had recently won, and they arrived at Marsh that same night to collect their prize, which was a specially baked cake.

‘
En Antártida
,’ said Leopaldo, ‘
no bay fronteras
’–there are no borders.

I was shown the hospital, a larger metal box on stilts where two appendicectomies had been performed and several children had been born. They were very proud of this hospital, and it was frequently used by staff from neighbouring bases – even Argentinian staff. There really aren’t any borders in Antarctica, and Antarctic politics, which revolve around territorial claims, international no-mining legislation and environmental protection, and which are complex, tense and often hostile, are played out not in the icy continent but in government buildings of the First World’s capitals.

The Chileans behaved very confidently down there. Usually they were shy in international situations. But they were nearer home than anyone else on King George, better equipped, and there were more of them, so it was natural that they should feel confident. They were very conscious too that what they were doing was important for Chile.

Expatriates in Santiago often told me that they found Chilean nationalism an offensive characteristic. They complained about people being narrow-minded, and were frustrated by the general lack of interest in anything beyond
Chilean borders. Such things are more noticeable to residents than travellers – though I did observe a limited field of vision, even among educated Chileans. As in the case of Argentina-hating, a sense of inferiority seemed to be lurking in the shadowy hinterland of the national consciousness, and I wondered if it didn’t breed a kind of insecure nationalism. Self-obsession and insecurity were apparent in the disproportionate and repetitive media coverage generated on the rare occasions when anything Chilean enjoyed international success. I grew tired of reading about the Chilean iceberg on the stand at the Seville Expo. The newspapers were excessively parochial – the front section of the leading quality broadsheet,
Mercurio
, was filled with vacuous shots of the aristocracy at cocktail parties. ‘Geophysical isolation,’ said one of my history books, ‘means that a nation is more than usually obsessed with itself.’